News From Civinomics June 3-17

Contents:
1. New Workshop: Highway 1 
2. New and Improved Meetup for Facilitators
3. New Features And Bug Fixes
4. From The Blog: Mapping The Civic Genome
5. Updates from The Gov2.0 Space

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1. New Workshop: Highway 1

Used by more than 100,000 vehicles each day, Highway 1 is by far the most heavily traveled transportation corridor in the county. It’s also the most congested, especially during peak weekday hours. One of our Civinomics colleagues, who commutes daily from Corralitos, says it sometimes takes him up to an hour and a half to get into Santa Cruz. Yikes.

This long line of semi-idling cars constitutes a drain on our local economy and a burden on the environment, which is why Civinomics has decided to tackle it head-on in our new workshop on Highway 1. Whether you dream of an HOV lane, yearn for a hovercraft or have a cool idea for sprucing up bus service, join this workshop and share your ideas. Let’s get creative about this vexing problem and make it a relic of the early 21st century!

2. New and Improved Meetup for Facilitators

Who’s going to facilitate the facilitators? We are! And we're moving the show to Tuesdays. Starting June 18, Civinomics will hold regular meetups to get feedback and share advice on how to manage online workshops. The first one is Tuesday, June 18 at 6pm at Cruzioworks, 877 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. We’ll be serving light refreshments and snacks, so come one, come all. Learn more and RSVP here. 

 

3. New Features And Bug Fixes

When you’re building an engine of social change, there’s a lot of activity under the hood. Since the last newsletter, we’ve implemented the following:

• More optimization of load times of workshops and profiles with heavy activity
• Facilitator and Listener roles made more visually explicit (per member input)
• Workshop "Notables" and "Activity" sections in right column combined and renamed to "Participants & Activity"
• Resource listing titles now link to the comments and additional info, with the resource URL displayed and opening a new browser tab or window to the linked page (per member input)
• Refactoring of profile edit page
• Ability to upload member profile picture (per member input)
• Text formatting for comments (per member input)
• Listing of workshops by geographic scope moved to top bar "workshops" dropdown menu
• Workshop geographic scope explicitly listed on workshop landing page in "Information" section
• Bug fixes

On our To Do list:

• One-click signup and login with Facebook connect (per member input)
• Email alerts of comments on your items (per member input)
• Acknowledgement of adopted Ideas

We’re grateful to all the Civinomics members who've shared their feedback. Do you have an idea for how to make the site easier to navigate or more useful? Visit the How Can We Improve Civinomics? workshop and tell us! We want to know. 

4. From the Blog: Mapping the Civic Genome

This week Civinomics CEO Manu Koenig tackles the issue of readily accessible government data (or the lack thereof). Reams of information on expenditures and policy details have technically been available to the public but stored in static PDFs, hidden in a mountain of other information on local government websites. But the times, they are a-changin’. And with President Obama’s new executive order on open government, all publicly available information will soon be stored in digital form and accessible from open government databases. What does this mean, you ask? Manu breaks it down and explains the implications for Civinomics and people everywhere. Read it here.

In other Civinomics blog news, Product Manager Chris Neklason gets back to basics with Why Civinomics? Inspired by some lively discussions on the site, Chris explains why we chose the term “workshop,” delves into Civinomics’ mission and offers a behind-the-scenes look at internal deliberations as we establish policy for a brand-new social enterprise. 

 

5. Updates From The Gov 2.0 Space

The concept of crowdfunding civic projects has always intrigued us. Rather than having to go through a long, drawn-out process of passing, then enforcing, a tax measure, could local governments fund projects by providing citizens the opportunity to contribute to them directly? Like playing the New York Times budget game, but locally? 

Enter SpaceHive, a British startup that has created a platform to do just that. Now, it remains to be seen how effective a project like this can be, but we’ll be watching. Who knows? Within a year we may be doing something similar here...

 

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and have a great week!
 
The Civinomics Team
Manu, Robert, Edolfo, Chris, Todd and Traci